[Ham-Mac] Re: Cabrillo to ADIF Converter

[Dick Kriss]

On 9/30/06 1:53 PM, "Bill Coleman" <aa4lr at arrl.net> wrote:

> 
> On Sep 3, 2006, at 9:48 AM, Dick Kriss wrote:
> 
>> The SCC contest was not on the list of LoTW
>> supported contests and tqsl could not sign the file.
> 
> You can add new cabrillo contests to TQSL. Go to Preferences and
> click on the Cabrillo Specs tab. Once you enter the definition of the
> contest, TQSL will be able to sign files for that contest.
> 
> Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr at arrl.net
>

I looked into a Cabrillo to ADIF Converter and that was too hard. I also
tried AA4LR suggestion a few times; however, it had to be adjusted and
tweaked for just about every contest.   A very simple solution if you use
the cocoaModem RST - QSO Number template is to change the name of the
contest in the Cabrillo file to EA-RTTY.  The LoTW tqsl.app recognizes the
EA-RTTY contest name and will let you digitally sign the call.log file in
the .tq8 format required for transmission to LoTW.  The LoTW robot could
care less about the contest name but the name tells it were to look for the
call worked.  The specifications for the EA-RTTY contest maps too the
cocoaModem RST - QSO Number contest template and works FB with the LoTW
robot.

I did the same thing for the 24-Sep-06 CQWW RTTY contest and the LoTW robot
accepted my 261 QSOs in the cocoaModem prepared Cabrillo file.  The only
change I made was to change the contest name to EA-RTTY.

I was not as lucky with the CQWW contest robot.  The cocoaModem RST - QSO
Number template let me log the CQ zones but could not log both states and
zones and the CQWW robot barfed on my aa5vu.log file.

The cocoaModem application is an excellent RTTY decoder application;
however, W7AY has no interest in maintenance or further development of the
contest interface.  Since I may be the only cocoaModem user interested in
contests, I have saved and use the older cocoaModem version 1.15 for
contests.  I use the latest version cocoaModem 2.0 for RTTY DX, PSK and FH
QSOs; however, until fixed there is a bug in how cocoaModem 2.0 (up to v28)
rights or saves the contest .XML file. You can start a new contest session
but cannot resume a saved session after closing the application.

The bottom line is I am using what I have that works until I break down and
get one of the new Macs that will run a number of windows based RTTY contest
programs.  I plan to go over to the darks side for RTTY contests but will
continue to use cocoaModem I for other modes.

As previously discussed on this reflector there is no market from the Mac
Ham community, so the Mac contesting application project was abandoned.  Don
Argo has incorporated a number of contest tools in his excellent
MacLoggerDX; however, it is a logging program - not a contesting
application. 

73, Dick AA5VU